Jefferson Parish officials Saturday lost their fight for federal permission to use barges and rocks to keep oil out of two major passes into Barataria Bay.

Ted Jackson/The Times-PicayuneAn work boat uses a oil containment boom to collect oil floating as far as the eye can see off the coast of Grand Isle last week.

Col. Alvin Lee, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers' New Orleans District, said the plan to barricade Pass Abel and Four Bayou Pass would do more harm than good by speeding water through other passes and possibly hastening the flow of oil into interior marshlands.

The denial leaves local officials with little recourse, said Parish Councilman Chris Roberts, a chief advocate for the plan.

"It's very disheartening," he said. "Obviously, it's not what we were led to believe from the beginning."

Gov. Bobby Jindal's press secretary, Kyle Plotkin, issued a statement saying: "Only a government bureaucrat would say rocks are more harmful to our water and marshes than oil. The corps took weeks to review the plan only to reject it today -- and this denial is another unfortunate example of the federal government's lack of urgency in this war to protect our coast.

An open oil well on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico entered its 75th day of gushing Saturday as skimming vessels sat idled by inclement weather and six-foot-high waves. Nonetheless, crews continued working throughout the day to reposition and, in some cases, reattach miles of oil-catching boom displaced by the passing of Hurricane Alex and the formation of another low pressure area east of the leak's epicenter off the Louisiana coast, said Petty Officer Kelly Parker, a Coast Guard spokesman stationed in Houma.

Parker said federal authorities began field tests Saturday on "A Whale," the 1,100-foot Taiwanese oil skimmer that can reportedly hold up to two million barrels of crude -- dwarfing the capacity of other collection vessels in the gulf waters. The testing is expected to take two days.

Jefferson officials' clash with the corps began June 7, when they first proposed blocking five passes to keep oil from marshlands north of Louisiana's barrier islands. The plan was later whittled down to two passes before Lee denied it outright Saturday.

Throughout June, the corps balked at issuing permits for the projects, and more than a dozen coastal scientists and engineers protested in a letter last week that the rocks could do more harm than good.

"In sum, we believe that the current plans are based on a common goal to protect interior wetlands from excessive oiling, but ultimately the plan relies on an engineering and construction approach that carries high economic and environmental risk, and threatens the sustainability of the very ecosystem we are all trying to save," stated the letter to Lee.

Beside increasing water flow by narrowing the passes, scientists argued, the rock barriers could also cause scouring that would speed erosion, adversely mix fresh and salt water and possibly damage the intricate network of oil and gas pipelines buried in the seabed, according to documents released by the corps.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Gulf Restoration Network, a coalition devoted to protecting and repairing the gulf's ecology, expressed similar concerns in letters to the corps.

Initially, BP, the oil company responsible for the leak, had agreed to pay for the dikes operation and put aside $24 million. But Roberts said none of that money would be released without federal permission.

Grand Isle Mayor David Camardelle has argued that local jurisdictions should move ahead on their own, but Roberts said Jefferson, suffering from an already tight budget, doesn't have the necessary cash on hand.

Saying the corps lacked any sense of urgency in the face of such an emergency, Roberts blamed the decision on governmental red tape. "This latest decision is yet another example of a broken bureaucratic process of disconnected talking heads that are far removed from reality," he said.